Will Sloan’s review published on Letterboxd:
A boilerplate documentary about Linda Lovelace and the Deep Throat phenomenon, built around Legs McNeil's interview with the erstwhile Linda Boreman shortly before her death.
The slicker, more famous "Inside Deep Throat" (2005) is a jolly anti-censorship celebration that devotes a few minutes to the possibility that, oh yeah, Linda Lovelace may have been abused, but hey, maybe she's liar, so who cares? By contrast, this documentary is focused more on Lovelace's story, and on her book "Ordeal," in which she claimed she was forced into sex work against her will by her abusive boyfriend/manager, Chuck Traynor.
McNeil comes to the condescending conclusion that Lovelace's claims were "completely and utterly full of shit," but that she probably believed them. Revisiting Lovelace's story in the MeToo era -- which has promoted a more nuanced understanding of how abuse works, and the ways people cope with and sometimes try to normalize their abuse -- I find her claims persuasive, and McNeil's attempts to debunk them almost wilfully obtuse. Certain details from Ordeal have been convincingly debunked, such as the claim that she was held literally at gunpoint on a movie set, but discounting the book because of these distortions is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater (everyone agrees that Traynor was a hateful person who beat her regularly, and just because the gun wasn't literally there doesn't mean it wasn't there, y'know?). McNeil spends a lot of time pointing out that Traynor was not physically abusive to his wife Marilyn Chambers, which proves nothing. After Lovelace points out that she never made another porn film after Deep Throat, McNeil suggests, "If she was so ashamed of these sexually explicit films, I don't know why she was capitalizing on it by hanging out with Elvis Presley?" -- which doesn't seem like such a huge mystery to me. Lovelace is accused by several interviewees of refusing to accept personal responsibility, but then false equivalences are drawn between Traynor and the Second-Wave Feminist movement because both exploited Lovelace, you see. McNeil concludes that Lovelace's Catholic upbringing instilled in her a binary understanding of "good" and "bad" (which sounds true to me), but also that "she didn't know how to say no," which drastically oversimplifies her situation, and is certainly victim-blaming. More likely is that our society hadn’t yet developed a sufficiently complex/nuanced vocabulary for abuse yet, and this was the easiest way at the time to communicate her experience at the time
In short: an unpleasant viewing experience, and a testament to how resentful people can be when their fun is spoiled.